Challenges Facing the Higher Education Sector
Jennifer Cooper
20/09/2021
Visualisations using Open Source Education Data.
I have made this code Open Source and fully documented on my GitHub page
Overview of Challenges Facing the Higher Education Sector
- A keyword search term in journals identified a few relevant papers: COVID-19 and digital disruption in UK universities
- A quick general Google also identified articles from JISC, Deloitte and other White Papers
- I used webscraping of the key terms to generate the following table of challenges from 3 webpages 1 2 3
| Number | Challenges |
|---|---|
| 1 | The digital revolution |
| 2 | Rising demand for places |
| 3 | Pensions and pay industrial action |
| 4 | University autonomy and the Office for Students |
| 5 | Brexit and EU students |
| 6 | Racial inequality |
| 7 | Recognition for professional services teams |
| 8 | The campus of the future |
| 9 | Rising student expectations |
| 10 | Technology and digital innovation the norm |
| 11 | Operating in a global context |
| 12 | Linking estates strategy and the student |
| 13 | Attracting and retaining the best talent |
| 14 | Rising costs and shifting funding |
| 15 | Making research sustainable |
| 16 | The growth of consumerism |
| 17 | Shrinking profitability margins |
| 18 | Increasing competition |
| 19 | Shifting industry requirements |
| 20 | Brexit – the great unknown |
- Producing a word cloud of a report can help to visualise key areas of interest (Quality Assurance Agency Taxonomy for Digital Learning)
- Increased digitalisation is a challenge (and opportunity) for the higher education sector (associated words):
Focus on the Effect of COVID-19 on Higher Education for the rest of this document
- This has accelerated digitalisation
- Increased focus on student wellbeing
- Has had some advantages (reducing some barriers to learning, largely through technology)
- Challenges include whether students feel they are getting value for money, student wellbeing during isolation, prospective job market for recent graduates
Community cases in a particular region will determine future lockdowns and therefore online offerings
- Blended/hybrid learning
- Flexibility of the institution to offer online materials (Staff/Student perspective)
- Libraries offering more online resources, webchat services etc
5 Open Datasets:
We can obtain Higher education institution education and plot on a map of England
There is open data for regional numbers of COVID-19 cases - plotting this we can see a general trend of peak cases.
Combining this data on the map with higher education location can give us a Shiny App (open in separate window)
Graduate outcomes pre COVID-19 and during COVID-19
- Using HESA data we can look at the effects of the 2017/2018 cohort compared to the 2018/2019 cohort to look for general trends
Open Data: HESA Data
- We can also look at the percentage of graduates in full time employment across each institution in an interactive and searchable table
- Manipulating the data further we can plot the top 20 institutions for graduates being in full time employment with their confidence intervals.
Student Wellbeing and Experience during COVID-19
- COVID-19 has had an increased impact on student wellbeing
‘The Student COVID-19 Insights Survey includes information on the behaviours, plans, opinions and well-being of higher education students in England in the context of guidance on the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.’ SCIS Data
- The below pie charts shows the responses from two questions of the survey from 2nd June 2021 (sample size 1,110, weighted count 2,076,000):
1. Since you started in the Autumn term 2020, how satisfied or unsatisfied are you with your academic experience? For example - learning experience or academic support.
2. Since you started in the Autumn term 2020, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with your social experience? For example - sharing time with others, meeting new people or having access to sports and fitness facilities
- Drilling down further into the reasons for academic dissatification (very dissatisfied/dissatisfied) - learning delivery is consistently the biggest reason over the latest 4 weeks of the survey.